the first
days of his mourning he lights upon the packet of letters that betrays
her. The end of the story is in the final stroke of irony which gives
the man this far-reaching glance into the past, and reveals thereby
the mental and emotional confusion of his being--since his only
response is a sort of stupefied perplexity. Charles must be held in
readiness, so to speak, for these last pages; his inner mind, and his
point of view, must be created in advance and kept in reserve, so that
the force of the climax, when it is reached, may be instantly felt.
And so we have the early episodes of Charles's youth and his first
marriage, all his history up to the time when he falls in Emma's way;
and Flaubert's questionable manner of working round to his subject is
explained. Charles will be needed at the end, and Charles is here
firmly set on his feet; the impression of Emma on those who encounter
her is also needed, and here it is; and the whole book, mainly the
affair of Emma herself, is effectively framed in this other affair,
that of Charles, in which it opens and closes. Madame Bovary is a
well-made book--so we have always been told, and so we find it to be,
pulling it to pieces and putting it together again. It never is
unrepaying to do so once more.

And it is a book that with its variety of method, and with its careful
restriction of that variety to its bare needs, and with its scrupulous
use of its resources--it is a book, altogether, that gives a good
point of departure for an examination of the methods of fiction. The
leading notions that are to be followed are clearly laid down in it,
and I shall have nothing more to say that is not in some sense an
extension and an amplification of hints to be found in Madame Bovary.
For that reason I have lingered in detail over the treatment of a
story about which, in other connections, a critic might draw different
conclusions. I remember again how Flaubert vilified his subject while
he was at work on it; his love of strong colours and flavours was
disgusted by the drab prose of such a story--so he thought and said.
But as the years went by and he fought his way from one chapter to
another, did he begin to feel that it was not much of a subject after
all, even of its kind? It is not clear; but after yet another
re-reading of the book one wonders afresh. It is not a fertile
subject--it is not; it does not strain and struggle for development,
it only submits to it. But that aspec